Rudolph Burckhardt, Smithsonian Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden via AP Isamu Noguchi, an American-born son of a Japanese poet, stands with his "Light Sculpture" in this 1944 image. Click photo for larger image.

WASHINGTON -- Isamu Noguchi began as a carver of sensual, naturalistic human forms, then turned to daring exploration of abstract shapes using unusual materials like stainless steel and rice paper.

The Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum celebrates the 100th anniversary of the pioneering 20th century sculptor's birth with a review of his work.

The 55 sculptures in the show, which opens today, do not include his earliest work, but the catalog to "Isamu Noguchi -- Master Sculptor" shows him at 18 copying a seated statue of Abraham Lincoln. At 22 he is depicted beside a life-size plaster nude of Undine, a water nymph from classic mythology.

Born in Los Angeles, son of a Japanese poet and an American writer, Noguchi spent his early school years in Japan, from where his mother shipped off to high school in Indiana at 13.

At age 23, Noguchi got a travel stipend from the Guggenheim Foundation. It took him to Paris, where he worked as an assistant to Constantin Brancusi, a Romanian who was among the leading sculptors there in the first half of the century.

Noguchi was impressed by Brancusi's devotion to polished surfaces and the direct handling of materials -- a break from processes of sculptors who had their wax or plaster models cast into metal at workshops.

	Kevin Noble, Smithsonian Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden via AP Isamu Noguchi's 1943 "Monument to Heroes," a painted cardboard, wood, bone and string sculpture. Click photo for larger image.

He came back to New York, and replenished his funds with realistic portraits of composer George Gershwin and dancer Martha Graham, among others. He became friends with the philosopher and designer R. Buckminster Fuller and did a portrait head of him in chrome-plated bronze that is part of the exhibit. With money in his pocket, he set off again for Paris, Moscow, Beijing and Tokyo.

Noguchi had met Mexican painters Diego Rivera and Clement Orozco in New York. They welcomed him in Mexico City and sent him to a convent that had become a public market. He did a 72-foot "History of Mexico" in colored cement on its four walls.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Noguchi became one of the thousands of Japanese-Americans rounded up by the U.S. government and placed in internment camps. As an East Coast resident, Noguchi did not have to move to the camps -- only West Coast Japanese-Americans were forced to go -- but he volunteered to stay at a camp in Poston, Arizona, where he hoped to improve bleak conditions by designing playgrounds and gardens.

Authorities ignored his plans and he left after six months, but he said he was later troubled by dreams of escape. His "Monument to Heroes," done in bone, wood, string and black-painted cardboard, expresses his revulsion to war.

Valerie J. Fletcher, curator of the Hirshhorn show, describes a series of what Noguchi called "lunar" sculptures as a symbol of hope. But they were never shown in his lifetime. Noguchi died in 1988.

	Michio Noguchi, Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden via AP Isamu Noguchi's 1943-44 "Red Lunar Fist", a Magnesite cement, plastic resin and electric light sculpture. Click photo for larger image.

The surviving seven works are brought together for the first time in this exhibit, put together with the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The abstract cement shapes are illuminated by hidden red, yellow and blue electric lights,

In later life, Noguchi spent much his time hunting for and working with different types of stone in Italy, Greece, Sweden, Japan and elsewhere.

Fletcher described his fondness for cutting into solid stone to show differences between inward and outward coloring, as one way of suggesting contrasts in nature and a way to speak to people across national borders, language barriers and ethnic differences.